Interested in ereaders

[Evan Leibovitch]

On 27 September 2013 20:56, Molly Tournquist <mollytournquist-ifvz4xmYPRU at public.gmane.org>wrote:


> But they're better than they were before. We're no longer talking about
> the likes of Kindle DX screens, which were huge, expensive and still not
> all that high res. If the low hassle of compact ereaders must not matter,
> it seems sensible for them to be getting generous boosts of resolution. Not
> that it would really matter, if technical issues and hacks were alike
> across the line, it would be a question of the soft point on the price
> curve. But that might just be what they'd want to do, high res to optimize
> them heavily for textbooks. Maybe even make them bichromatic.
>

Not sure what your point is.

Resolution of small tablets has been increasing faster than that on
ereaders, where there is much more competition.
The nexus 7 -- available now -- has exactly the same resolution as the
yet-to-ship Kindle HDX and well more than the Fire available now.


> > Both ePub and PDFs allow for their documents to contain embedded Internet
> > links; these are generally useless in a dedicated eBook reader whose
> > browser is either horrid or non-existent.
> It's hard to see how this fits in the whole context. It seems quite
> feasible for this to be handled by a freely tweaked open platform
> ereader(or even a device in between an ereader and an audio player). For
> example, by having a program that, while packing the ereader, fetches and
> converts the linked pages and even adjust them to a friendlier arrangement.
>

The moment you add "heavily tweaked", it's nearly impossible to do
comparisons. The stock experience -- and especially the one provided by a
vendor relying on bookstore-lock-in -- is what needs to be compared. The
Kindle has deliberately eliminated much of the flexibility of the standard
Android experience, extending to the ability to render rich-media ebooks.


> > Audio playing, especially with the screen off, uses next to no juice. And
> > even for a sighted person there is at least an occasional appeal from
> > talking books.
>


> Now this is looking a little confusing.
>

Why? Audio and video capability matters, especially if you don't want to be
carrying multiple devices. I want a single device that is equally capable
of video, audio and high-resolution book rendering, and that allows a
choice of media providers as well as side-loading that which I bring
myself. Dropbox, Google Drive and similar cloud storage needs to be
supported.


>
> > If all you're trying to do is
> > replace a paperback, the e-reader will do the trick. But newer
> generations
> > of ebooks are being built with embedded multimedia capabilties (there's
> > good reason the ePub standard was updated to be based on HTML5). And
> > current ereaders can't deal with that.
>


> Hopefully they're not talking about hooking the ereader up to a CD rom
> drive.


Honestly I have zero idea how you interpreted that from my answer.



> Sounds very weird that they would still pitch it with a word like
> multimedia.



That was *my* choice of words, using a term that has meaning to non-geeks
and is well understood. It simply refers to the fact that what we now know
as books will gradually be released from the constraints of paper, and that
means that dedicated ereaders will need to keep up (and eventually fail)

That you find this observation weird changes neither its suitability, nor
its inevitability. The ereader is the MP3 player of this generation, with a
heyday (now passed) and then a fall. Just like MP3 players, they will
inevitably give way to multifunction devices except in niche situations.
The only difference here is that MP3 players were never subsidized by music
sellers; that may buy some time for ereaders but won't prevent their demise.

- Evan
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